Medium.com

10/19/2016

Our new home experience is powered by a feature called collections. The top list of sections on our home screen will be a mix of popular verticals (like Politics or Culture) and more specific, timely events (think the Oscars or Apple vs. the FBI). You’ll be able to find new collections in these sections every day, curated by Medium and a handful of trusted testers—for now. If you’re interested, you can also read about our curation principles. Collections are homes for topic or theme-based content from Medium and beyond that will allow users to bring together Medium stories, people, and publications to follow, as well ideas from the rest of the web.
We believe that in order to create a great reading experience for humans, other humans should be part of that process. There’s a unique sensibility that individual curators bring, whether that’s a specific tone, voice, or simply good taste. They can help act as a filter for readers in guiding our limited time and attention to things that matter, calling out stories that haven’t yet been seen by many, helping to easily showcase the big stories of the day, or sometimes just adding a dose of weird and wonderful. Today, collection creation is only open to a small group of trusted testers. Eventually, we want to open the ability to create collections and allow everyone on Medium to curate around a specific topic, issue, or theme — that’s where the true power of this system really lies. If you want to stay updated on the collections feature, you can add your name to the interest list.

Yes, Medium is hiring Influencers. That makes sense to me (perhaps because this is what I do for a living so this is a bit of inside baseball — apologies there.) This platform needs to grow in order to gain the momentum, the user base, the writers, the reach, the notoriety — everything that it takes in order to be a lasting platform that people want to come to, share, and eventually help with the monetization strategy. That’s business. However, Medium does already invest in community, both in support and in outreach functions. On their jobs page, you can see a slew of Influencer listings alongside tons of engineers, analysts, designers, communications folks, and, yes, a community position. Heck, they’re hiring for an employee experience manager: all the listings are hallmarks of a company going through its next round of hiring after they received some funding. They need to build more technology. They need to get good data to figure out what they are doing. They need to make things prettier, shout it from the rooftops, bring in amazing tentpole folks, and keep nurturing the community in a deeper, more meaningful way (also their own employees — because retention is important for everyone!) Remember: it’s way cheaper to keep a user than to bring them in or win them back.

“But Medium helps unknown writers get discovered every day!” you might say, and it’s not that this isn’t true, but the question is whether these things are intentional or whether they’re accidental. A simple way to measure this is by looking at a company’s actions. Do they invest heavily in their community? Do they work hard to implement features to help the unknown get noticed? Do they really listen to their users? Well, Medium has canceled sponsorship on a number of community loved publications, they have no immediate plans to assist small writers with monetization and they still haven’t hired any community support staff, implemented a public road-map or provided a channel for feature requests.

A place where folks who use Medium talk with folks who make Medium.

We started Talkback recently as a hub specifically designed to have a dialogue between people who use Medium and people who make Medium. While that’s all well and good, it’s one place and most of these conversations happen in the wilds of Medium (like your post).
So here’s how I’m thinking about communities at Medium. First off, you’re right: they are communities. The Medium Community isn’t really a thing: Medium is a platform, a tool, and that’s what binds us together — but it’s not really why we are here. We’re here for each other: for what we read, what we write, how we interact with each other.

We are entering a new era for the Internet — a pessimistic one. You don’t have to take my word for it.

Let’s start with web pages. Web pages suck. (Ben Thompson, Stratechery) They are bloated with ads, making download sizes simply ridiculous, but publishers can’t help it. Ads are now run through ad networks, and thus the people making the content don’t have control over their own monetization anymore. Of course, if you have even a tiny bit of tech savvy you already have AdBlock installed, which cost publishers $22 billion in 2015. I imagine this only makes the problem worse, since they need more ads to compensate.

For being “the front page of the internet”, Reddit’s front page is crap. There’s a simple explanation for why this is the case. Thorough, quality content takes time to appreciate, and it generates varying opinions. An informative article may take several minutes to read, and people are going to disagree about the validity of its arguments. Thus, the material that makes it to the top is going to be simple to digest and have widespread appeal. At the moment the top post on Reddit is a picture of a sleeping cat, and the second post is a meme about not having anything to eat in your kitchen. They generate immediate positive reactions that almost anyone can relate to. And they’re super dumb. This is the Lowest Common Denominator Problem.
As the scale gets larger, so does the problem. Smaller subreddits dedicated to particular topics suffer far less than colossal pages like r/funny and r/gaming. A community of 10,000 can still have meaningful, personal conversations. A community of 100,000 will be far more likely to post stuff like “Does anybody else breathe air?”
It’s not just Reddit either. Many types of content operate on this principle. Call Me Maybe topped the charts, action flick clones draw crowds at the box office, and Two and a Half Men was lucrative enough to seem worth salvaging even after the main character was written out. (There’s nothing wrong with enjoying these things, but you can’t pretend they complex or artful.)

You’ve seen the symptoms. I hoped back then that this future would be averted. Cat videos and memes are fine for YouTube or Reddit, but this is a writing platform. It should be about curating really good, original work. It should be about connecting and having conversations.

In short, it should have communities. And Medium ain’t got none.

Publications aren’t communities. Tags aren’t communities. They are content ownership vehicles and search tools.

The launch of Timeline in 2011 buried the feature so deep in the interface that one could conclude Facebook didn’t want to deal with Notes any more. It seemed like people were satisfied with short-form social media posts, and few needed a place for long-form blogging.

But then there wasMedium. Launched in late 2012, it’s slowly gained steam to become THE place for infrequent bloggers, touchy-feely corporate responses, journalistic experiments, and all kinds of *thinkfluenceship*. Meanwhile, Tumblr was maturing from quick GIF reblogs by scene kids to a legitimate blogging platform under its new owner Yahoo.

Facebook needed to wake up. The mainstream was ready to blog, and they didn’t want to set up a whole custom website to do it. In 2013, I wrote a stern call to arms for Facebook to overhaul Notes with three objectives.

用手机查看邮件，突然发现有一封说，戴卫·卡尔DavidCarr过世了。熟悉他的人，也许会很震惊。因为，前一天，他还在CNN上作嘉宾。但是，他的确在自己58岁的时候，倒在办公室里了。杰罗姆正在写一组关于Medium的文章《埃文·威廉姆斯的第三次新媒体浪潮？》，这是其中的第三篇。

他们在Medium上设计了一个CMS系统（内容管理系统）。在Medium上，写作、排版、美化是一件轻松的事情，所见即所得。不久以前，我也开始用这个平台写作，感觉不坏。最终，Medium成了一些作家的崇拜对象，许多名家在这里发表自己的传记。当然，其中一些人是有稿酬的，大部分的人没有。Medium出资请一些专业的作家和记者写稿，是为了防止这个站点“贫民窟化”，被低质量的贴子所淹没。在每天1000到1200篇贴子中（2014年5月间，目前每天发贴数量在1500篇左右），95%左右来自非职业写作者。

Today, many of our 70-or-so employees publishes to hatch.dm on a regular basis (14 posts today from 10 different people). I’ve personally published 289 posts (versus 42 on Medium). Everyone reads it. It’s core to the company. And I’m constantly impressed by what people share about our work. I often think: “Wow, this is a great post, I wish more people could see it.”

In fact, the other day I wrote this on hatch:

what if a lot of our hatch posts were public?
I’ve said this before, and now I’m saying it again: I think a lot of the posts we write to each other could be made public, with little modification, and it might be good. The reason it might be good is hard to argue. I’m not picturing polishing them up and turning them into public-worthy posts. I just mean publishing them, as is. I find the idea of a company being transparent to the outside like this intriguing.

Richer content embeds in our editor.

Mixtapes were originally thought of as a new conceptual unit in the Medium system. They would live alongside users and collections as this awesome new content form that anyone could create and share. Blah, blah, words. If you care, you can read more about our idea and what we did during hack week here.

But for the remainder of hack cycle, introducing an entirely new primitive isn’t realistic.

So what problems are mixtapes actually solving — and how can we address these leveraging our existing system?

Instead of trying to capitalize so heavily on an individual story, this year we’ll move to bundling articles and ideas. We’ve already seen Vox introduce their cardstack primitive, experimenting with a new way of presenting contextual packages of information to explain the news.

In 2015, we’ll approach stories less as atomic units themselves, but rather as subunits that can be packaged within a new type of content primitive: mixtapes.

Responses are the way you connect and converse with other people on Medium.

When you find a story that inspires, enrages, or otherwise engages you, use the space at the bottom of the original post to write your response. Or maybe you have a question you want answered, or stories you want to hear. Jump in and make your voice heard.

Responses are not free-for-all comments

There’s an important distinction between responses and regular web comments — besides that they can be whole posts — that we probably haven’t made clear enough. While, unlike Medium’s sidebar notes, they are not author-moderated, not just anyone can come around and post something to the bottom of your story that others see.

Anyone can write something as a response and that response is public, meaning it has a public URL and can be shared. However, it’s only seen at the bottom of the original post if one or more of the following apply:

It’s from the same author as the original post
It’s recommended by said author
Or — for those logged into Medium — it’s written or recommended by someone you follow
In other words: No one will see shitty comments at the bottom of your post unless you recommend them or they follow the people who make the shitty comments (in which case, they might not think they’re shitty). And you can make sure everyone sees the good ones.

It’s not obvious, but it’s quite an elegant system. ☺

Responses are a big part of the Medium platform and play an important role in tying our growing network together.

But a lot of this isn’t obvious at first glance: responses aren’t visible from the stream, and it’s not immediately clear why some show up below a post and others don’t.

Today we’re rolling out some changes to make things more clear.

We are pleased to announce that Medium recently raised $57 million in capital.

Medium was created in 2012 and opened to the public in October of 2013. Since the beginning, we have offered a simple and elegant writing tool combined with a network centered around participation. Less than two years later, Medium is home to well-known influencers and regular contributors, as well as people who don’t write consistently but have discovered Medium as the place to share thoughtful insights, entertaining perspectives, and moving human stories with the world. More than 20,000 people write on Medium each week, and their words are enjoyed, considered, and debated by millions.

We’re making some changes to Medium. You’re going to love them.

Well, that’s the story of how removing a killer feature turned Medium from an awesome, interest based Social Network of motivated people interacting around content and turned it into just another blogging platform.

I’m not a crazy lone wolf on this: check out the — reasoned and rational — comments on this page explaining the new rules (plus here & here). They’ve tried to explain the decision, although all three posts don’t address that this change devalues their other good features. It now places the focus on an individual’s own social graph, which isn’t very egalitarian for anyone without massive external networks, or those looking to reach new people.

Another analysis for the future of Medium and other media companies.

Publishing platforms forget two things avid readers and amateur writers care about. Concentration of content for the former and distribution of content for the latter.

At first glance, the only player that seems to be trying to solve both is Medium. It’s not only a publishing platform but a publication and a social network as well.

There’s no other place on the internet where I can find such surprising, insightful, and unique stories as I can here.
It’s as if the environment Medium has created somehow nurtures true storytelling, encouraging us to dig deeper — being proactive instead of reactive, as Jason Smith describes it.

The truth is that value can be a more nuanced concept than the blunt interpretations we’re used to. Yes, writers can go elsewhere to get explicitly paid. And we do. Unless we write for one of the publications, Medium is unlikely to become a direct source of income.

It may well become a focused source of opportunity though, just like Twitter before it, and that might end up being more valuable in the long run.

It's something in between a publisher and a platform.

If the platisher model is a stable formula — that is, if it can scale to massive audience numbers and motivate marketers to pay a premium for presence — what’s to stop the pure platform players like Facebook, Twitter and Google from embracing it? YouTube has already gone the furthest, fostering subject-based “networks.” Facebook’s latest creation, Paper, employs editors to curate and organize content. And on Wednesday, Dick Costolo told Wall Street, “We want to do a better job organizing content for our users along topical lines rather than just chronological lines.”

Media people, like me, tell ourselves that pure platforms won’t be interested in doing what we do, or that they won’t be good at it, and perhaps that’s true. But it’s also true that enterprising organizations adapt to opportunities. Traditions and biases can be overcome. The rise of the platishers is evidence of just that.

For an example, look at Medium, a platisher that raised $25 million in 2014. The company commissions strongly edited articles on well-defined themes while simultaneously allowing anyone in the world to post their writing on Medium. Founded by Evan Williams of Twitter, the company established itself by paying talented writers and editors to develop individually branded “collections” of articles. In its early days, Medium also created a veneer of gatekeeping by forcing new users to apply for accounts. These behaviors tend more toward the publisher end of the spectrum.

But as a platform attracts users, it will be tempted to exercise little oversight so that users can post quickly and freely. If the platform has not previously exercised much oversight, then this won’t be a problem — but if it has taken a publishing role, then conflicts can emerge. With Medium, problems surfaced when the company scaled its open-to-all-platform and allowed anyone to post. Several writers and editors working for Medium (many of whom came from publishing) expressed public dissatisfaction.

Editor Arikia Millikan wrote about how hard it was to clean up her workflow after Medium threw open the floodgates and any user could submit content to her collection. When she joined Medium, she was able to put plenty of attention into every article she curated, but when Medium made it easier for users to submit content, she was suddenly drinking from a firehose.

Medium will change how people produce and find online written content; Ev Williams knows how to make writing on the web easier and better, and has already done it twice; I like the product. However, Medium won’t resonate with certain...

| Javier Sandoval | Techstars grad at 18. Teaching early-stage entrepreneurship at Brown University.

Medium, which turn a year-old this month, has writers, editors and everybody else who deals in sentences asking a lot of questions: What is it exactly? Is it a publication? Is it a platform? Is it both? How will it make money?

Finally, there’s the question of whether Medium is a platform or a publication, and if is a publication, what responsibility does it have when it comes to plagiarism, accuracy and all those other J-School abstractions.

Or could it be the vanguard of something new and different? Alexis C. Madrigal at The Atlantic suggests.

So what is Medium? Medium is a place to read articles on the Internet. Medium is a blogging platform, like Wordpress or Blogger. Medium is the new project from the guys who brought you Twitter. Medium is chaotically, arrhythmically produced by a combination of top-notch editors, paid writers, PR flacks, startup bros, and hacks.

Is it the publication for our particular moment?
There’s a lot to chew over here, but I wonder if this hybrid publication can completely own the conversation in the same way as Twitter. We’re already seeing publications try to adopt Medium’s more innovative features before it becomes a serious threat.

Quartz is allowing commenters to annotate paragraphs and The New York Times is experimenting with tweetable highlights from stories, both features are similar to features on Medium. And when it comes to commenting tools, Nick Denton at Gawker Media may have everyone beat with Kinja.

What Medium becomes is as good story as there is, but whether it features writing or content is an open question.

Twitter Co-Founder Evan Williams has an ambitious new plan: to shift our daily reading habits away from consuming incremental news bites and towards engaging with enlightened ideas curated by an intelligent algorithm.

“Everyone has a story or insight that is worth repeating and they just don’t have the venue to get it heard,” adds former Wired.com Editor Evan Hansen, a senior editor at Medium, charged with building out its tech, science, and business coverage. Medium sees itself as a hybrid between professional outlets like The New York Times and the unwashed blogger free-for-all of The Huffington Post (which is owned by TechCrunch parent company, Aol). Instead, Medium wants to be the platform for everyone’s one truly viral idea.

Health startup entrepreneur Nick Crocker probably never thought his simple post about a walk through the junk food aisles at his local grocery store would snag over 1 million(!) views. Crocker’s rather elegantly crafted “The World Is Fucking Insane” is a photo-heavy, first-person journey though grocery aisles lined with monster stacks of chemically altered sugary foods on his way to pick up some milk. Its visual simplicity evidently expressed the public’s latent frustration for America’s health crisis in a way that other statistics-packed medical news did not.

A change is taking place in how people consume content. Consumers want to filter out noise and one-stop shop. Find out what Medium means for content marketing.

An intuitive, flexible platform for telling stories. Marquee's authoring tool and infrastructure allow for publishing beautiful content faster and easier than ever before.

I don’t think this is how I’m supposed to use collections.

You actually would, I just thought the Upworthy-esque title would be ironic.

For these reasons, Medium has the chance to go big, the chance to capture the old magazines, consumer writing, and new types of media on phones and tablets that tie into social networks. It has the chance to be an independent, public company, and stand on its own.

It’s even easier to tell, collect and discover beautiful stories. A new Medium, open to all.

According to a report by Recode, the popular blogging platform Medium has closed a $25 million round of funding led by Greylock, with participation from Google Ventures and several individual investors including Chris Sacca.

This meshes with TechCrunch’s earlier reporting that Medium was looking to raise around $20 million. We also reported at the time that Greylock was a leading contender in the race to fund Medium. Former Twitter CEO Evan Williams is a co-founder of Medium.

With $25 million in cash, Medium will have all the capital it could want to expand its content strategy and strengthen its technological underpinnings. The service is known for its clean design, and open doors to those looking for a platform to write. It’s the thinking person’s Thought Catalog, in a way.

After Ev Williams first started working on Twitter, he reached out to Jason Stirman in Texas. “You have to come out here,” Williams said. “Twitter is happening and we want you to join us.” But Stirman wasn’t easily convinced. “I told him, ‘You want me to move for 140 characters and a button? I don’t think so,’” Stirman says. “And I’ll never forget this. Ev looked me right in the eye and said, ‘If we do this right, it’ll totally change the way the world communicates.’ I thought to myself, ‘I like you, but you’re crazy.’” He regretted his decision almost immediately, and 18 months later, when Twitter hit 50 or so employees, he made the jump.

A New Storytelling Experience

Today, we’re launching a set of major improvements. We’re calling it “Medium 1.0.”

With 1.0, we’ve redesigned the reading and writing experience to make your stories look better and have more impact. We’ve also changed how collections work to enable curation and improve discoverability.

Anwar El Wakil
Wow, I had no clue they didn't pay their speakers. I agree, but there is a thought that is provoking me. You just wrote a whole post for free for Medium. Which is pretty much the same Idea of TED no ?

Frank Swain
No — firstly in my view it’s a platform not a publication (like Wordpress, for example), secondly I don’t write here for free.

Brian Dominick
You get compensated for contributing to Medium?

Christophe J. Dehais
Authors can be contracted to write on Medium. Didn’t know that.

Q: Why is Medium paying writers?

A: One of our long-term goals is to bring in readers to enjoy content of all kinds, whether commissioned or not; great commissioned writing will help attract those readers. One of our other long-term goals is to create sustainable models to support writers. Right now, as we are learning more about what works on Medium and what doesn’t, we are funding some content ourselves.
Q: Who is getting paid?

A: Our editorial team is contracting with a few people to contribute one-off articles and ongoing columns.

In order to leverage Medium’s amazing editorial tools Matt created a private Facebook group and filled it with some of the top names in tech and top publishers on Medium. The amount of value we’ve seen from this group has been immeasurable. Each of us shares our drafts with the group and takes the time to comment and suggest further points to make. This post is no exception.

The group’s power extends beyond a simple gathering of writers editing and commenting on each other’s work. This group personally led me to some amazing business connections and new friends, which has been the coolest part of this entire process.

One morning in February 2012, we clicked a button and launched a Kickstarter campaign. We wanted to build MATTER — a publication based around a new way to create really great long-form journalism about science, technology and the future. What followed was an extraordinary vote of confidence in the idea: by the time the campaign closed a few weeks later, 2,500 people had helped us raise $140,000, almost three times the amount we’d targeted.

More recently, MATTER received another incredible vote of confidence. One of our earliest Kickstarter backers was Ev Williams, the co-founder of Twitter and Blogger. After we launched, Ev told us about his new company, Medium. He and his team want Medium to be the best place on the internet to read and create high-quality content, and they suggested that we become part of that project.

It didn’t take us long to realise how much sense that made for MATTER. We’re delighted to say that the move is complete: MATTER is now part of Medium. We’ve put together this FAQ to explain the thinking behind the move and the impact it will have on what we do.

MATTER IS the home for in-depth journalism about the ideas that are shaping our future. Our stories range across science, technology, medicine and the environment: everything from corporate misdeeds and untold environmental scandals to radical new scientific ideas and the people behind them.

MATTER ISN'T quite a website, but it's not really a magazine and it's not exactly a book publisher, either. Instead, MATTER is something else. We focus on producing individual long-form stories for consumption on any device, whether it's your computer, phone, e-reader or tablet. And we're trying to make it a sustainable way of paying for the hard work required to produce the best reporting.

MATTER IS YOU. We got started in unusual fashion: with a Kickstarter campaign in early 2012 that raised more than $140,000 from ordinary people who believed in what we wanted to achieve. That support got us off the ground. It also convinced us that the people who are committed to MATTER — our Kickstarter backers, our Members — are central to our success. So we try and get them involved in what we do as much as we can. So far that includes our "editorial board" (an innovative collaborative commissioning process) and the opportunity ask questions directly to our contributors. And there's more on the way.

I love using Medium. Which is why I wanted to lovingly suggest some new features for everyone’s favourite digital publishing platform.
1. Search
2. Broader Analytics
3. Open API
4. Embedded Video

Geoff and Jon Lax flew out to San Francisco to meet with Jason Goldman and Ev to hear more about what Obvious was doing and how Teehan+Lax might be able to help.

In the meeting, they explained they were exploring ideas around publishing platforms. They had been building this new product for a few months. It was incredibly sophisticated and complex and had taken on a few forms already, none of which felt quite right.

They wanted to try something new. It didn’t need to be a full working product, a prototype would suffice. Ev believes product decisions need to be made from actual usage. Even though we wouldn’t be building a fully working product, this prototype would give them a better sense if their new product idea was worth pursuing further.

Jason came to Toronto for 2 days and we began roughing out the prototype. For the next two months we worked on designing and building out various approaches. We had weekly contact with Obvious. We were working on this like a traditional client: Sprints of work presented on a weekly basis for feedback.

Ev Williams

I make systems that encourage typing and thinking (Blogger, Twitter, Medium).

Published

October 25, 2012
About Medium
What we’re trying to do with Medium

It’s been just over two months since we opened the curtain on the preview version of Medium. Since then, we’ve been kind of quiet (but busy). I thought it might be a good time to shed more light on what we’ve been up to—as well as what we hope to accomplish—with this little project.
A Place for Ideas

Let’s face it: There is plenty of media in the world already. And no matter what happens to traditional media economics, there’s nothing to stop the torrent of information rushing from smartphones, corporations, and new-fangled media startups onto the Internet, available for the world to see.

While it continues to be more and more efficient to put media-type stuff out there, we think there are big improvements to be made in a particular type of media “stuff”: That which is not necessarily personal and not necessarily news. That which we might just call ideas.

What kind of ideas? Many kinds: A particular viewpoint on the happenings of the day (or of the past), hard-earned knowledge about how to do something better, a story that makes people laugh, smile, or feel something meaningful. If you have thoughts to share that you want to impact or influence people with—beyond just your friends and beyond 140 characters—we want to provide the tools and the place.

Medium — a newest publishing platform with a fast, clean interface and can, at times, resemble the Pinterest layout, too.

by Stefan Lubinski

I have signed up, like others so that I can see for myself what I think about the platform, instead of having to rely solely on editorial reviews and social snippets. I think the bigger question is: How many of the early adopters will stay? And that will depend on a number of factors.

I can say that so far I have found that the nav is extremely restrictive. After you have looked at one of the collections you can't navigate back to a home page with all of the available collections. You are forced to have to go back to the original Introduction Page to go to each collection individually. I realize that will change as this opens up, but it was not the greatest first impression.

Aug 16, 2012